Bulletism- Intro to Drawing Bad Art (Patreon)

Forgetting the Fundamentals

When learning the cold hard fundamentals of drawing, such as perspective, value and color theory, we can forget the fun, playful spirit that made us pursue art in the first place.

So these last couple of lessons in the ITDBA course are going to be dedicated to some techniques that I’ve found useful for forgetting the cold hard fundamentals. 

These techniques can be used to get out of your own head, experiment with materials, rediscover the joys of simply making a mess with art but they can also be integrated into your work and become part of your process. The Cold hard fundamentals will improve your work with these methods. But they are not a pre requisite.

Bulletism

The first one of these techniques is what I call Bulletism. Bulletism just means splattering ink on a piece of paper. And then using the splatters that the ink made to suggest images to you.

I call it bulletism because that’s the name Salvador Dali made up for it. He used this technique to create his illustrations for Don Quixote.

Dali shot bullets filled with ink onto the paper for his illustrations. So one way you can stay true to his version of bulletism is to dip a nerf bullet into some ink and shoot it at your paper.

Or you can fill a squirt gun or a spray bottle with ink. 

The Classic Splatter

Many ink bottles come with a little dropper in their lid.You can suck up some ink into that, and then slash it downwards toward the paper.

Brushes

You can also use brushes to splatter. The length of the bristles from the ferrule to the toe of the brush will dictate the character of these splatters. Longer bristles more intense splatters, shorter bristles less intense splatter.

There are as many ways to use this technique as there are ways to splatter ink on a piece of paper.

I’ve seen people use bouncy balls dipped in ink and letting them bounce all over their paper, fill water balloons with ink and throw them at canvases, even miniature catapults filled with ink.

The Punchline is "draw what you see"

Whichever experiments you uses, just draw what you see. 

An Illustrated Poem by Justinius Kerner. The drawing is made out of an ink blot folded in half. Kerner's Ink blots may have inspired Herman Rorschach to develop the Rorschach Ink Blot Test.

What do you see?

Ralph Steadman 

The artist Ralph Steadman has had a long career of using ink splatters as the basis of illustrations. If you’re interested in this technique I recomend checking out his work.

This is a great documentary about him. One of my favorite art documentaries actually. 

Here's a short video of him working. 

What I find interesting about Steadman is that he often starts with a phoot reference of what he wants to draw. Then makes a splatter or two and then finds a way to make that splatter into the subject that he has in mind.

Abstract Expressionism 

Splatters create intense, dramatic, and chaotic energy and emotion in a piece of art. And on the other end of the spectrum from Ralph Steadman there are very non representational, abstract expressionist artists who use splatters as pure energy such as Julie Mehretu, Albert Oehlen, Lee Krasner 

Pareidolia

These techniques exploit our pareidolia. Which is our tendency to see meaningful images or hear meaningful sounds in randomness or noise. A quote often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci goes “just as one can hear any syllable in a bell, so you can see any figure in the shape of ink from a sponge thrown at the wall.”

There's no wrong way

My drawings with this method tend to be very intense and dense. But you could take a more minimalist approach as well. It’s really up to you.

They won’t all be bangers. But that’s kind of the point. It’s better to make bad art than no art at all.

Materials

In terms of materials for doing these splatters, I like to use ink. 

I use Speedball Super Black ink. It’s a type of India ink and as its name suggests it is super Black. But there are also acrylic inks (I like liquetex) they come in a lot of different intense colors. There is also liquid watercolor you can get the fancy ones by Dr. Ph Martin or you can do the cheaper Daler Rowney ones. You could also mix acrylic paint with water, but only if you do this on paper. If you do it on canvas or a wood panel, you might run in to problems with the paint sticking to the surface.

The materials that I’m using to draw over the splatters with are a Pitt pen, which is the same thing as a micron or a fine liner pen but it's just what Faber Castel calls their version of that, a brush pen, I really love this pocket brush pen by pentel, the ink dries waterproof, but it takes a minute to dry all the way so you get a lot of time to smudge and smear it and it's refillable, a black Prismacolor colored pencil, a white gel pen and some white acrylic paint. 

But there are so many different mediums you could use. I’ve gotten good results with pastels, paint markers, gouache, it’s really up to you. Experiment.

Oh and here's a solid nerf gun. 

Have fun

Goodnight Sweeties